We brought you some preliminary details about the SmartQ 5 MID a little while back, but didn’t have much to go on. Today we’ve found that the SmartQ 5 is indeed going to have a $132 price tag, though it may never end up coming officially to the US. The processor is also ARM as Chippy theorized based on the low cost. Apparently it will be ARMv7 specifically, which I believe throws it into the Cortex family. The device will be running Ubuntu.

The lack of keyboard and non-customized-for-touchscreen OS will probably not make this a good productivity computing device. I think the low cost would make this little unit a perfect single task device. Imagine running a nice full screen twitter client or Facebook interface on it to have around the house with you.

[Engadget]

Looks like we have an interesting mystery device here. The SmartQ 5 MID has been captured in the wild. The background image of the device immediately reminded me of the background of the Nokia N810 [Portal page]. At first I thought it might be running Maemo, but seeing as this device is not from Nokia, I’d say that is highly unlikely. It appears to be running a simple Linux distro. The hardware itself seems very simple, with a 4.3” 800×480 screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, and just four hardware buttons on the top of the device. The source puts the price of the unit at $132 which prompts Chippy to assume that it is Arm 11 based. So far there aren’t many more details other than some images of it running FBreader, a Linux based e-Book reader. Considering the fact that it is Linux based, I’m sure it will be able to plenty of common Linux tasks, but it will all come down to a matter of how quickly, and how well the interface is adapted for touch. After seeing that the stylus is featured in many of the photos, I don’t have my hopes up for a finger usable interface, and the lack of keyboard probably means this device will turn out to be more of a toy than a productive pocket computer. Does that sound a bit pessimistic?

Swing by the source for more images. via [Engadget]